ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on and discusses Italian cultural roles and how they are reflected in the provision of health care in a small region of Northern Italy. It seeks to understand why we have found it difficult to work co-operatively in the Italian health care system despite our enthusiasm for doing so. We discuss how culture influences our reciprocal roles and the way we administer care. We take a historical, cultural and political approach in order to answer these questions.
CAT language and tools lend themselves to describing complex systems, rendering them easier to reflect upon. Using our own expectations about becoming psychologists, our personal experience of our own culture and society, we look at how the world has changed from the ideals we held when we were young in the 1960s and 1970s; noting a change from a social model, in which equality and social mobility might be possible in the post-war period, to the apparently more individualistic and more unequal world we live in now.
